Fox Tray

Bloke goes up to a bar and orders five pints of bitter, a gin and tonic, a scotch, and a bag of pork scratchings.  Barman asks ‘Would you like a tray?’.  Bloke answers ‘Don’t you think I’ve got enough to carry?’.
Can you give an old joke a home?  For just £24 a month, you could keep Radio 4 Extra going and so ensure that jokes like that are preserved for the nation, whether the nation wants them or not.  For more information, see Barry Cryer.
That joke is so old that there are remarks about it being old written in hieroglyphics.  Old, and true.
Because nobody should operate a tray without being trained in the art first.  By trained I mean nobody should try to use a tray who is not a character in a P. G. Wodehouse story or a drunk uncle who does a rendition of ‘Mule Train!’ that is astonishing in its capacity to shock, delight and put the poor drunk bastard in A&E with a concussion every Boxing Day.  For the unwary, the untrained or those without sufficient upper body strength, the tray is simply a way to drop a lot of things more efficiently.
One should never have to transport more than two cups of tea at any one time unless you are a paid employee or, to give them their politically correct term, skivvy.
The tray itself though is something of a social marvel.
At one end of the social spectrum, say Downton Abbey, the tray itself is made of silver and is worth more than the vicar's virtue, and that's before it's loaded up with enough booze to make the conversation at the dinner table of an English country house bearable to anyone who thinks that 'tying one's own flies' is a simple precaution to prevent unintended. chapout.
Then there is the Formica tray, that has done service in many a home for many a decade.  In more civilised times, the tray would be beringed with the evidence if a million cuppas safely transported from kitchen to front room.  In these less enlightened times, the tray is a personal dining table, allowing each family member to enjoy their evening meal not in the company of each other, but bathed in the gentle light of the idiot lantern.
Let us not forget either the plastic tray, black or red, always slightly damp, picked up at one end of a self serve counter and loaded with sandwiches and beverages before being used to assault the cashier who thinks it's OK to charge you £7.99 for a BLT and a coke.
And let's not forget coke and, in that act, take a moment to reflect the makeshift tray, that flat object that can be used to transport stuff from hither to yon and, when fashioned from something black and shiny, is ideal for serving stimulants.
My new acquisition is far from an impromptu tray, although it is stimulating.  It is, in short, magnificent.  Who can fail to be thrilled by a proper tin tray featuring a country house scene with a couple of foxes frolicking in the foreground.  Who?  As a the owl, also pictured, might ask.
It's a tray that tells a story.  What is happening in the house?  Is there a party, is there a tray within a tray in use?  Or is there bad business afoot, is the daughter of the house being forbidden from marrying her true love, a humble woodcutter, albeit one who has had his woodcuts exhibited at the Tate Modern.  And what of the foxes?  What role do they play in this drama.  Is it Evelyn Waugh, or M R James territory that we're in?  All of these questions and more occurred to me as I saw this object for the first time, but perhaps the most pertinent was 'are you going to buy that tray or just look at it some more?', as posed by the shopkeeper.
I think it's charming.  I am also convinced the house pictured is the one from 'The Mousetrap', which would explain why the tray is just the right size to serve up a book and a cuppa, or a revolver.

Good cure for a hangover

A tea urn.  Note simplicity and practicality of design, centered around holding gallons of the stuff, and a simple spigot for rapid dispensing to thirsty masses.

Those bastards at Nottage Hill have successfully weaponised wine, that’s the only explanation for the results arising from drinking the filthy stuff that came out of the carton I bought in good faith from the grocers.  It also led to the establishment of a new phrase in the household: ‘two litres of red, all day in bed’ although in truth I don’t think that I’ll ever need to use this handy mnemonic because the phrase ‘I am never drinking wine from a carton ever again’ is much easier to remember.

In truth, the packaging should have been warning enough in itself.  I am not a wine snob, far from it, but even I know that no luxury product should come in a carton.  And, whatever the French would have you think, wine is a luxury product, or at least it should be.  Milk and fruit juice come in cartons, decent wine does not.  If necessary, apply this simple test: what product looks at home, in a carton, on the breakfast table.

In principle, wine in a carton is an excellent idea.  It’s the reality that’s a let down. 

To get a bottle of wine open, traditionally one needs a corkscrew and a flourish, this results in a pleasing pop as a prelude to a cheery glunking.  Of course, the advent of the twist cap has somewhat reduced this pleasure but what has been lost in terms of the erosion of heritage has been made up for in the efficiency with which plonk can now be opened and decanted.  With the carton, there is theatre involved in the opening of the packaging as one tries to winkle the spigot free of the container, an operation at the conclusion of which, take it from me, you will have earned your drink.

Wine comes in bottles. 

Tea can come in urns.

The industrialisation of tea by making it in an urn was perfected by the Women’s Institute of course, but the practice of making a proper cup of tea available in huge quantities has spread far and wide, a genuine force for good.

If you read the papers, you might be fooled into thinking that there are many varieties of tea.  Indeed the supermarket shelves are filled with boxes of ‘Earl Grey’ or ‘Assam’.  This is not tea.  When you ask for a cup of tea you expect to be given English Breakfast tea with milk in it and, if you are fancy, the option of not having sugar.  The great Kyril Bonfiglioll immortalised tea made with Carnation Milk as being a delightful shade of orange and this is indeed makes an already wonderful beverage even more appitising, orange being an acceptable shade of tea in exactly the same way that it is an unacceptable shade of skin, unless you’re an Oompa Loompa.

Urn tea is one of the cornerstones of this nation, from the jumble sale in the village hall to the cricket pavilion to the ready room of a fighter squadron, but variants have their place.  For instance builder’s tea, so called because it is practically a construction material in itself, being so strong and heavily sugared that, if made properly, one can stand a spoon up in it.  Such tea can be found in cafes but is best enjoyed in its native environment, on building sites or anywhere that cement is mixed with purpose.

Of course, if one were seeking to market builder’s tea one would be better off describing it as ‘artisan tea’ and playing up the health aspects of it, or at least concealing just how much sugar goes into the average cup by, for instance, simply stating that it provides 6000% of your recommended daily allowance.

There are those people, normally the sort of people that have lace at the end of their sleeves, lavender sachets in their knicker draws (or indeed have knicker draws) and exist mostly in etchings and ITV period dramas who will take a cup (cup?! I ask you, tea comes in a mug, always has, always will, always should) of Dajeeling and pronounce it ‘refreshing’.  These people are not to be trusted with a hod.  Or indeed a kettle.  Or the vote.

Norfolk notes - drink

Hydration is important. Normally in England in October one can rely on the elements to try and hydrate you as often as possible, whether you want it or not. But as a family that cannot function without constant supplies of tea, this was the holiday where the thermos flask, and flask tea in particular, came into it's own.

Flask tea is a very particular brew. You can make up your tea however you choose, brew in a pot and decant to a flask, adding the milk on site later separately, or add the milk to the flask and save yourself the hassle. Or just take boiling water in the flask and take the tea bags and the milk separately. It doesn't matter, because once anything from a flask enters a cup; that cup contains flask tea. It's like alchemy, with tea.

The taste is unique. I could describe it as being the result of the thermos flask needing to be sealed and hence depriving the tea of oxygen, or being the result of some sort of in-flask brewing or fermenting process, but the reality is that it's probably the result of not washing out the thermos flask as often or as thoroughly as one should. What makes flask tea taste like flask tea is probably the ghost of soup. That, the tannins and quite a few molecules of metal from the interior of the flask.

It also tastes different because it's served outdoors. Those cowboy movies where they all sit round a camp fire that has a pot of coffee brewing on it, that's flask tea. It's the taste of freedom, of independence and, most of all, tea.

Tea's poor relation, coffee, also got a look in. Oddly, we'd walk on the beach and then have some tea to give us the energy to go somewhere for a coffee. While tea is drunk out of a flask, coffee is taken in pubs or bars or coffee shops because it's hard to reproduce a really good latte from a flask and a cuppachino is impossible because the chocolate sprinkles melt in transit. Having a posh (bought) coffee was not just a treat, it washed the taste of the damn flask tea out of our mouths.

Because I was driving the wagon, I was on it as well and so was denied my normal lunchtime tipple of six pints of whatever has the most interesting decoration on the pump handle. This did not stop others developing a taste for a lunchtime glass of champagne as a reasonable option to a latte. Champagne served by the glass is the sign of a civilised society. It's the perfect lunchtime alternative to coffee in that it is refreshing after a morning's walk, but it won't keep you awake all afternoon.

It also means it's somewhat difficult to make the transition back to work following the holiday. As one stares at a paper cup full of, probably quite decent, coffee, one cannot help feeling a little short changed that it's not a flute of a bubbling beverage that one can describe as 'biscuity'.